AUTHOR ARCHIVES

Uri Friedman

Uri Friedman is a senior associate editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees the Global Channel. He was previously the deputy managing editor at Foreign Policy and a staff writer for The Atlantic Wire.

August 3, 2016
Analysts largely agree that the hacking of various arms of the Democratic Party, and the release of hacked emails that deepened divisions within the party just ahead of its presidential convention, is a big deal. But there’s less agreement about whether what we’re witnessing is fundamentally old or new. The...

July 28, 2016
In 2014, shortly after Russia forcefully intervened in Ukraine and admitted Crimea into the Russian Federation, Richard Shirreff stepped down as NATO’s deputy supreme allied commander Europe, one of the highest-ranking positions in the military alliance. The British general proceeded to do something highly unusual. He criticized the government he...

July 14, 2016
These days, terrorism seems not just more lethal and more common, but more widespread. The death toll in recent weeks speaks for itself: 22 people dead in Bangladesh, 49 gone in the United States, 44 gone in Turkey, 292 gone in Iraq, then another 37, another 12, yet another 12....

July 6, 2016
The statistics are as astounding as they are ignored: Americans are about as likely to be killed by their own furniture as by terrorists. Noncommunicable conditions like cardiovascular disease, cancer, and diabetes are responsible for vastly more American deaths than terrorism. Depending on how you count, gun violence in America...

July 5, 2016
On Wednesday, Facebook made an announcement that you’d think would only matter to Facebook users and publishers: It will modify its News Feed algorithm to favor content posted by a user’s friends and family over content posted by media outlets. The company said the move was not about privileging certain...

July 5, 2016
Several years ago, Gallup asked people in 142 countries to respond to a series of statements designed to measure employee engagement—involving matters like their job satisfaction, whether they felt their work was important, and whether they had opportunities in the workplace to learn and grow. What the polling firm found...

June 13, 2016
Imagine you’ve had it with your house. Or, more precisely, you’re conflicted about it. You’ve loved living there. It’s a mid-century design—the biggest house on the block. You don’t really want to move. But the years, the kids, they’ve taken their toll on the place. In looking into what to...

May 2, 2016
Is it a coup or isn’t it? Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff claims the impeachment proceedings against her, which have now progressed from the lower house of Congress to the upper house, have “no legal foundation” and “all the features of a coup.” Vice President Michel Temer, who would succeed Rousseff...

April 1, 2016
During the Crusades of the Middle Ages, a typical Frankish knight wore “a coat of chain mail or scale armour, [a] shield and a helmet,” Piers Mitchell tells us in hisbook on warfare and medicine during the period. The chain mail, a mesh formed with interlinked metal rings, offered protection,...

March 24, 2016
In October 2015, two suicide bombers killed more than 100 people outside a railway station in the Turkish capital of Ankara. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in the country’s modern history, but it was also something more, something not fully appreciated at the time, according to Robert Pape, a...